After the rant, something positive

[oloriel]

... or rather "somethings", but that's ungrammatical, so.

* The date for next year's Drachenfest has been announced and against all odds it's not at the same time as the Mittelerdefest, but a week later! I've been waiting for - and dreading - the announcement because it was pretty likely that both events would fall around the same weekend and then I'd have had to decide for just one (that is, for the MEF...). As I'm already missing this year's DF for obvious reasons, that'd have been very sad. So yay for actually being able (time-wise; anything else we'll see) to do both! \o/

* Five of my stories have been nominated for this year's MEFAs. To be sure, with the majority of them I'm pretty much certain they don't stand a chance - one might just get lucky, it's got Fingon in it and contains no overly complicated or controversial concepts, which always makes for crowd-pleasers - but it's still nice people liked them well enough to nominate them. Of course, as in past years, there are some stories where I'd secretly hoped someone would nominate them and nobody did (I tell myself that of course people loved them but didn't remember just now because they're old stuff :P), and as I despise self-nomination and fail at self-advertising, I'll just have to suck that up. Ah well. Five noms is still awesome, particularly as I've been a very unproductive fanficcer these past months.

* Today I managed to catch up with my gardening plan for the kitchen part of the garden, i.e. I managed to finish weeding all nine veggie patches and sow everything that had to be sown by June. As it's still June (if just barely), I consider this a splendid success. We'll see whether I'll manage to take care of the rest of the garden soonish, too, but there's less pressure - although all those spreading weeds are a pest, they're not interfering with anything important. Now I just have to harvest and use up the redcurrants and blackcurrants, as well as all those ripe woodland strawberries. And figure out what to do with my surplus tomato plants - this year, I actually have too many. (When you sow tomatoes, you bring out at least twice as many seeds as you want plants, because usually at least half of them won't grow anyway. This year, all of them grew, and two so powerfully that I had to take slippings, and these slippings in turn all took root, and then I got another plant from the uphill neighbour which I couldn't politely refuse, so now I have rather more plants than I bargained for -- which I guess is good, but I have to re-think my initial plans to make room for all of them.) Eh well, if they all manage to bring me ripe tomatoes, I shan't complain further!

* Am having an "actionism!" phase. Unfortunately it's neither typical nesting ("CLEAN ALL THE THINGS!") nor fannish actionism, but rather (mostly LARPish... it's that time of the year) creative stuff for which I lack the materials or skillz or both. Might nonetheless be tempted to try. At any rate, motivation is a good thing, even if it's kinda pointless motivation. Particularly if it's motivation for something other than sewing (current creative project of choice is "Pimp my cheap IKEA nursing bag!", which will result in something reasonably awesome, but my sewing finger is pretty raw by now, so I'll need a break after that). So there we go.

* Oh and I made carrot cake yesterday, with some variations from the original recipe (WTF what kind of crazy person puts ground apricot kernels into a cake? Don't those contain, like, Prussic acid?) and from my first attempt at the recipe (which was tasty enough but kinda dry). Added more baking powder, replaced apricot kernels with sweet almonds (I just trust those more, 'k?), replaced maize grits with just more "normal" flour (well, wholemeal spelt flour, but that's still more normal than maize grits :P), added chopped apple. Refused to mess around with the eggs as the recipe demanded (in the original recipe, you're supposed to separate the whites from the yolks, beat the whites, beat the yolks and mix them with all the other ingredients, then put the beaten whites back in. I assume this is supposed to make the cake fluffy or something, but as I said it was pretty dry nonetheless. So this time around I just put the eggs in whole from the start (I mean, without the shells, clearly, but whites and yolks together, yes?) because I hate separating eggs and certainly won't do it if it doesn't serve some sort of point. And I even used less eggs than the recipe called for because I only had two eggs left and our uphill neighbours' chickens had an unproductive week. AND IT WAS AWESOME. Not the least bit dry, instead sweet and fruity and juicy. Despite the spelt flour, too! Screw you, absurdly complicated recipe with your weird ingredients. I MADE YOU SIMPLER AND BETTER.

And that concludes today's random joyspam. Not a "Five things that made me happy" meme participant, but it might as well be...